Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was a man’s story rather than a woman’s story, as these may be distinguished; but quite for that reason women seemed peculiarly taken with it. Perhaps the women had more leisure or more courage to write to the author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters were from women; some of the letters were silly and fatuous enough, but others were of an intelligence which was none the less penetrating for being emotional rather than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what the author would be at, and their interest in his story implied a constant if not a single devotion. Now and then Verrian was tempted to answer one of them, and under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant at every point of his literary career, he yielded to the temptation; but one day there came a letter asking an answer, which neither he nor his mother felt competent to deal with. They both perceived that they must refer it to the editor of the magazine, and it seemed to them so important that they decided Verrian must go with it in person to the editor. Then he must be so far ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter and put himself, as the author, beyond an appeal which he found peculiarly poignant.

  The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgivings of his mother as they read it and read it again together, was from a girl who had perhaps no need to confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of the world where stories were written and printed. She excused herself with a delicacy which Verrian’s correspondents by no means always showed for intruding upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had over her as the only shadow of right she had in addressing him. Its fascination, she said, had begun with the first number, the first chapter, almost the first paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared; she had read too many stories to care for the plot; it was the problem involved. It was one which she had so often pondered in her own mind that she felt, in a way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as if the story was written for her. She had never been able to solve the problem; how he would solve it she did not see how she could wait to know; and here she made him a confidence without which, she said, she should not have the courage to go on. She was an invalid, and her doctor had told her that, though she might live for months, there were chances that she might die at any moment suddenly. He would think it strange, and it was strange that she should tell him this, and stranger still that she should dare to ask him what she was going to ask. The story had yet four months to run, and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding that she should not live to read it in the ordinary course. She was so ignorant about writers that she did not know whether such a thing was ever done, or could be done; but if he could tell her how the story was to come out he would be doing more for her than anything else that could be done for her on earth. She had read that sometimes authors began to print their serial stories before they had written them to the end, and he might not be sure of the end himself; but if he had finished this story of his, and could let her see the last pages in print, she would owe him the gratitude she could never express.

  The letter was written in an educated hand, and there were no foibles of form or excesses of fashion in the stationery to mar the character of sincerity the simple wording conveyed. The postal address, with the date, was fully given, and the name signed at the end was evidently genuine.

  Verrian himself had no question of the genuineness of the letter in any respect; his mother, after her first misgivings, which were perhaps sensations, thought as he did about it. She said the story dealt so profoundly with the deepest things that it was no wonder a person, standing like that girl between life and death, should wish to know how the author solved its problem. Then she read the letter carefully over again, and again Verrian read it, with an effect not different from that which its first perusal had made with him. His faith in his work was so great, so entire, that the notion of any other feeling about it was not admissible.

  “Of course,” he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, “I must show the letter to Armiger at once.”

  “Of course,” his mother replied. “He is the editor, and you must not do anything without his approval.”

  The faith in the writer of the letter, which was primary with him, was secondary with her, but perhaps for that reason, she was all the more firmly grounded in it.

  II.

  There was nothing to cloud the editor’s judgment, when Verrian came to him, except the fact that he was a poet as well as an editor. He read in a silence as great as the author’s the letter which Verrian submitted. Then he remained pondering it for as long a space before he said, “That is very touching.”

  Verrian jumped to his question. “Do you mean that we ought to send her the proofs of the story?”

  “No,” the editor faltered, but even in this decision he did not deny the author his sympathy. “You’ve touched bottom in that story, Verrian. You may go higher, but you can never go deeper.”

  Verrian flushed a little. “Oh, thank you!”

  “I’m not surprised the girl wants to know how you manage your problem — such a girl, standing in the shadow of the other world, which is always eclipsing this, and seeing how you’ve caught its awful outline.”

  Verrian made a grateful murmur at the praise. “That is what my mother felt. Then you have no doubt of the good faith—”

  “No,” the editor returned, with the same quantity, if not the same quality, of reluctance as before. “You see, it would be too daring.”

  “Then why not let her have the proofs?”

  “The thing is so unprecedented—”

  “Our doing it needn’t form a precedent.”

  “No.”

  “And if you’ve no doubt of its being a true case—”

  “We must prove that it is, or, rather, we must make her prove it. I quite feel with you about it. If I were to act upon my own impulse, my own convictions, I should send her the rest of the story and take the chances. But she may be an enterprising journalist in disguise it’s astonishing what women will do when they take to newspaper work — and we have no right to risk anything, for the magazine’s sake, if not yours and mine. Will you leave this letter with me?”

  “I expected to leave the whole affair in your hands. Do you mind telling me what you propose to do? Of course, it won’t be anything — abrupt—”

  “Oh no; and I don’t mind telling you what has occurred to me. If this is a true case, as you say, and I’ve no question but it is, the writer will be on confidential terms with her pastor as well as her doctor and I propose asking her to get him to certify, in any sort of general terms, to her identity. I will treat the matter delicately — Or, if you prefer to write to her yourself—”

  “Oh no, it’s much better for you to do it; you can do it authoritatively.”

  “Yes, and if she isn’t the real thing, but merely a woman journalist trying to work us for a ‘story’ in her Sunday edition, we shall hear no more from her.”

  “I don’t see anything to object to in your plan,” Verrian said, upon reflection. “She certainly can’t complain of our being cautious.”

  “No, and she won’t. I shall have to refer the matter to the house—”

  “Oh, will you?”

  “Why, certainly! I couldn’t take a step like that without the approval of the house.”

  “No,” Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer’s address from the letter. Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

  He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at least so far as regarded the house. The house had approved his plan, if one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine readers. He recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared the weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case was fairly stat
ed, but the privacy of the author’s correspondent was perfectly guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he had betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the table to his mother with rather a sick look.

  After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been a good deal of talk between them about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and from making himself mischievous illusions from it. She had since slept upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at waking, and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him with them, when fortune put this paragraph in her way.

  “Isn’t it disgusting?” he asked. “I don’t see how Armiger could let them do it. I hope to heaven she’ll never see it!”

  His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,

  “Why?”

  “What would she think of me?”

  “I don’t know. She might have expected something of the kind.”

  “How expect something of the kind? Am I one of the self-advertisers?”

  “Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing.”

  “Bold?”

  “Venturesome,” Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her son’s eyes.

  “I don’t understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about the writer of that letter — her sincerity, simplicity.”

  “Sincerity, yes. But simplicity — Philip, a thoroughly single-minded girl never wrote that letter. You can’t feel such a thing as I do. A man couldn’t. You can paint the character of women, and you do it wonderfully — but, after all, you can’t know them as a woman does.”

  “You talk,” he answered, a little sulkily, “as if you knew some harm of the girl.”

  “No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not single-minded, and there is no harm in not being single-minded. A great many single-minded women are fools, and some double-minded women are good.”

  “Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is what she says she is, what motive on earth could she have in writing to me except the motive she gives? You don’t deny that she tells the truth about herself?”

  “Don’t I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn’t always know her own motives, or all of them. She may have written to you because she would like to begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may have done it out of the love of excitement. Or for the sake of distraction, to get away from herself and her gloomy forebodings.”

  “And should you blame her for that?”

  “No, I shouldn’t. I should pity her for it. But, all the same, I shouldn’t want you to be taken in by her.”

  “You think, then, she doesn’t care anything about the story?”

  “I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about it. She is a serious person, intellectually at least, and it is a serious story. No wonder she would like to know, at first hand, something about the man who wrote it.”

  This flattered Verrian, but he would not allow its reasonableness. He took a gulp of coffee before saying, uncandidly, “I can’t make out what you’re driving at, mother. But, fortunately, there’s no hurry about your meaning. The thing’s in the only shape we could possibly give it, and I am satisfied to leave it in Armiger’s hands. I’m certain he will deal wisely with it-and kindly.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he’ll deal kindly. I should be very unhappy if he didn’t. He could easily deal more wisely, though, than she has.”

  Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. “All is,” he said, with finality, “I hope she’ll never see that loathsome paragraph.”

  “Oh, very likely she won’t,” his mother consoled him.

  III.

  Only four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian received an envelope covering a brief note to himself from the editor, a copy of the letter he had written to Verrian’s unknown correspondent, and her answer in the original. Verrian was alone when the postman brought him this envelope, and he could indulge a certain passion for method by which he read its contents in the order named; if his mother had been by, she would have made him read the girl’s reply first of all. Armiger wrote:

  “MY DEAR VERRIAN, — I enclose two exhibits which will possess you of all the facts in the case of the young lady who feared she might die before she read the end of your story, but who, you will be glad to find, is likely to live through the year. As the story ends in our October number, she need not be supplied with advance sheets. I am sorry the house hurried out a paragraph concerning the matter, but it will not be followed by another. Perhaps you will feel, as I do, that the incident is closed. I have not replied to the writer, and you need not return her letter. Yours ever,

  “M. ARMIGER.”

  The editor’s letter to the young lady read:

  “DEAR MADAM, — Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me your letter of the 4th, and I need not tell you that it has interested us both.

  “I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears to the importance of his work, and if I could have acted upon my instant feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so very unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented. I am sure that you would not have made it so frankly if you had not been prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will realize that as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified in taking a step so unusual as you propose without having some guarantee besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of your letter. Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase is, I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church, or, better still, your family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as a sort of letter of introduction to me. Then I will send you the advance proofs of Mr. Verrian’s story. You may like to address me personally in the care of the magazine, and not as the editor.

  “Yours very respectfully,

  “M. ARMIGER.”

  The editor’s letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the writer in replying, and it was not her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no longer able to do justice to her confession. Under the address given in her first letter she now began, in, a hand into which a kindlier eye might have read a pathetic perturbation:

  “DEAR SIR, — I have something awful to tell you. I might write pages without making you think better of me, and I will let you think the worst at once. I am not what I pretended to be. I wrote to Mr. Verrian saying what I did, and asking to see the rest of his story on the impulse of the moment. I had been reading it, for I think it is perfectly fascinating; and a friend of mine, another girl, and I got together trying to guess how he would end it, and we began to dare each other to write to him and ask. At first we did not dream of doing such a thing, but we went on, and just for the fun of it we drew lots to see which should write to him. The lot fell to me; but we composed that letter together, and we put in about my dying for a joke. We never intended to send it; but then one thing led to another, and I signed it with my real name and we sent it. We did not really expect to hear anything from it, for we supposed he must get lots of letters about his story and never paid any attention to them. We did not realize what we had done till I got your letter yesterday. Then we saw it all, and ever since we have been trying to think what to do, and I do not believe either of us has slept a moment. We have come to the conclusion that there was only one thing we could do, and that was to tell you just exactly how it happened and take the consequences. But there is no reason why more than one person should be brought into it, and so I will not let my friend sign this letter with me, but I will put my own name alone to it. You may not think it is my real name, but it is; you can find out by writing to the postmaster here. I do not know wh
ether you will publish it as a fraud for the warning of others, but I shall not blame you if you do. I deserve anything.

  “Yours truly,

  “JERUSHA PEREGRINE BROWN.”

  If Verrian had been an older man life might have supplied him with the means of judging the writer of this letter. But his experience as an author had not been very great, and such as it was it had hardened and sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirling in his mood, but in the deadly hurt which had been inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and carefully studied what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of the crueller intent because he had not known how much of personal vanity there was in the seriousness with which he took himself and his work. He had supposed that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his ideal of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home to him that he was swollen with the conceit of his own performance, and that, however well others thought of it, his own thought of it far outran their will to honor it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness as well as the offence offered him; of the two the consciousness was the more disagreeable.

  His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he sat quiet at his desk, with the editor’s letters and the girl’s before him, and he mutely referred them to her with a hand lifted over his shoulder. She read them, and then she said, “This is hard to bear, Philip. I wish I could bear it for you, or at least with you; but I’m late for my engagement with Mrs. Alfred, as it is — No, I will telephone her I’m detained and we’ll talk it over—”